The Skull Collectors - 9780226233482

"A haunting voyage through the peculiar---and peculiarly American---world of human skull collecting. Ann Fabian's remarkable and moving study illuminates as few other works have the powerful hold that the dead and their remains continue to have upon the living". Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, has Morton's skull wound up in a collector's cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world.

With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian tells the strange---and at times gruesome---story of Morton, his contemporaries, and racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the "rascally pleasure" of grave robbing, Fabian vividly re-creates the world of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Fabian also deflty traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day.

Full of compelling stories and singular insights. The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip to a little-visited but surprisingly impotant corner of American history.